The Daily Racing Form reported Thursday that trainer Todd Pletcher is sending strings of horses north to Churchill Downs and Belmont Park next week. Pletcher had pulled many of his horses from Belmont and sent them to Florida in late March as shutdowns and fears surrounding the coronavirus pandemic ramped up. Pletcher told the Form […]

The post Pletcher Sending Horses Back North After Waiting Out COVID-19 In Florida appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

A COVID-19 outbreak at a Maryland nursing home contributed to an increase in virus cases Sunday across the state that the governor described as “frightening.”

Bracing the nation for a death toll that could exceed 100,000 people, President Trump on Sunday extended restrictive social distancing guidelines through April.

Steo is taking steps to ensure the safety of buyers and sellers in an uncertain time.

There were no arrests during Saturday's protest in Annapolis, where organizers were calling on Gov. Larry Hogan to lift his executive order shutting down many businesses by the end of the month.

The number of cases of coronavirus in Maryland continues to rise.

Meteorlogist Taylor Grenda has a look ahead to a chilly May weekend.

The U.S. unemployment rate hit 14.7% in April, the highest rate since the Great Depression.

Baltimore City's non-fatal shootings have gone down from 232 this time last year to 195 now, but homicides have gone up from 102 in 2019 to 103 so far this year.

According to Wikipedia, “An oil painting is painterly when there are visible brushstrokes, the result of applying paint in a less than completely controlled manner, generally without closely following carefully drawn lines.” It also describes the effects created by a […]

The post How to Add Painterly Effects to Your Photos appeared first on Tech Tips » Surfnetkids.

Two Truths and a Lie is a parlor game where each participant tells two truths and one lie about themselves, and then everyone in the group gets to guess which tidbit is the lie. On the Internet, however, it seems […]

The post Two Truths and a Lie: How to Fact Check the Internet appeared first on Tech Tips » Surfnetkids.

President Donald Trump participated in a tour of a Honeywell International plant that manufactures personal protective equipment, Tuesday, May 5, 2020, in Phoenix .

The Minnesota National Guard conducted flyovers across the state to recognize the frontline health care workers of the COVID-19 pandemic response. A pair of F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft from the 148th Fighter Wing out of Duluth flanked a C-130 Hercules aircraft from the 133rd Air Wing out of Fort Snelling floew over downtown Minneapolis Wednesday morning, May 6, 2020.

Gardeners create backyard oasis with pond and waterfall.

The Min No Aya Win clinic on the Fond Du Lac reservation has seen a small amount of patients on a daily basis as they prepare for a wave of COVID-19 cases to hit their area. Dr. Vainio MD, a member of the Mille Lacs Band of the Ojibwe tribe has worked at the clinic for decades and has never seen anything like this pandemic. The week of May 4th, he worked the respiratory cases at the clinic. Only one doctor a week takes all the respiratory cases to minimize the amount of people potentially exposed to the virus.

Teens were photographed fishing at the Rum River Dam in Anoka and at Coon Rapids Dam Regional Park in Coon Rapids Wednesday afternoon and evening, May 6, 2020.

COVID cases are surging in Stearns County, in large part due to three meat packing plants in the area. We photograph St. Cloud Mayor Dave Kleis as he broadcasts his daily COVID-19 update to constituents on Thursday, May 7, 2020 at St. Cloud City Hall in St. Cloud, Minn.

What began in March as a small camp consisting of about a couple dozen homeless adults has now swelled to more than 100 residents in tents. Known as "Camp Quarantine," the fast-growing encampment has raised alarms over the health of the camp residents amid the coronavirus pandemic. Construction crews will begin installing a large metal fence around a homeless camp. Police are also expected to be on site too. The fence is being erected to contain the growth of the sprawling camp, which now has about 100 residents in rows of tents. The camp is located on Met Council property along the light-rail line near E. 28th Street and Hiawatha Avenue.

Since 1926, Howard's Point Marina in Excelsior on Lake Minnetonka has served up live bait, fishing accessories, refreshments and other necessities for enjoying time on the water.

Stephen Cole, Jennifer Hill, Luke Keele, Ilya Shpitser, and Dylan Small write: We wanted to provide an update on our efforts to build the Society for Causal Inference (SCI). As you may recall, we are creating the SCI as a home for causal inference research that will increase support and knowledge sharing both within the […]

Will Marble writes: I’m a Ph.D. student in political science at Stanford. Along with colleagues from the Stanford medical school, law school, and elsewhere, we recently completed a white paper evaluating the evidence for and tradeoffs involved with shelter-in-place policies. To our knowledge, our paper contains the widest review of the relevant covid-19 research. It […]

  This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. I’m going to say right up front that I’m not going to give sources for everything I say here, or indeed for most of it. If you want to know where I get something, please do a web search. If you can’t find a source quickly, […]

In comments, Joshua Ellinger points to this news article headlined, “Hundreds of thousands in L.A. County may have been infected with coronavirus, study finds,” reporting: The initial results from the first large-scale study tracking the spread of the coronavirus in [Los Angeles] county found that 2.8% to 5.6% of adults have antibodies to the virus […]

Kostya Medvedovsky writes: I wanted to direct your attention to the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium’s new projections. They’re very similar to the IMHE model you’ve covered before, and had some calibration issues. However, per the writeup by Spencer Woody et al., they do three things you may be interested in: They fix an […]

The above line is not a joke. It’s from Buzzfeed. Really. Stephanie Lee interviewed a bunch of people, including me, for this Buzzfeed article, “Two Big Studies Say There Are Way More Coronavirus Infections Than We Think. Scientists Think They’re Wrong.” I liked the article. My favorite part is a quote (not from me) that […]

So, there’s this new study doing the rounds. Some economists decided to study the twitter followers of prominent coronavirus skeptics and fearmongers, and it seems that followers of Nassim Taleb were more likely to shelter in place, and less like to die of coronavirus, than followers of Richard Epstein or Cass Sunstein. And the differences […]

The following came in the email: I’m a reporter for **, and am looking for comment on the stats Gov Cuomo just released. Would you be available for a 10-minute phone conversation? Please let me know. Thanks so much, and here’s the info: Here is the relevant part: In New York City, about 21 percent, […]

The OHDSI study-a-thon group has a pre-print An international characterisation of patients hospitalised with COVID-19 and a comparison with those previously hospitalised with influenza. What is encouraging with this one over yesterday’s study, is multiple data sources and almost too many co-authors to count (take that Nature’s editors). So an opportunity to see the variation […]

Steven Wood writes: There now some controversy regarding the effectiveness of Remdesivir for treatment of Covid. With the inadvertent posting of results on the WHO website. https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/23/data-on-gileads-remdesivir-released-by-accident-show-no-benefit-for-coronavirus-patients/ One of the pillars of hope for this treatment is the monkey treatment trial (the paper is here). As an experience clinical trialist I was immediately skeptical of […]

Simas Kucinskas writes: I would like to share some recent research (pdf here). In this paper, I develop a new method for estimating R in real time, and apply it to track the dynamics of COVID-19. The method is based on standard epidemiological theory, but the approach itself is heavily inspired by time-series statistics. I […]

Last week we discussed the Santa Clara county study, in which 1.5% of the people tested positive for coronavirus. The authors of the study performed some statistical adjustments and summarized with a range of 2.5% to 4.2% for infection rates in the county as a whole, leading to an estimated infection fatality rate of 0.12% […]

The talk will be sometime the morning of Wed 6 May in this seminar. Title: Some statistical issues in the fight against coronavirus. Abstract: To be a good citizen, you sometimes have to be a bit of a scientist. To be a good scientist, you sometimes have to be a bit of a statistician. And […]

The other day I wrote about the challenge in addressing the pandemic—a worldwide science/engineering problem—using our existing science and engineering infrastructure, which is some mix of government labs and regulatory agencies, private mega-companies, smaller companies, university researchers, and media entities and rich people who can direct attention and resources. The current system might be the […]

Seth Flaxman et al. have an updated version of their model of coronavirus progression. Flaxman writes: Countries with successful control strategies (for example, Greece) never got above small numbers thanks to early, drastic action. Or put another way: if we did China and showed % of population infected (or death rate), we’d erroneously conclude that […]

I’ve been reading a couple of old books of book reviews by Anthony Burgess. Lots of great stuff. He’s a sort of Chesterton with a conscience, for example in this appreciation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: As for Tom’s forgiving Christianity—‘O, Mas’r! don’t bring this great sin on your soul! It will hurt you more than […]

I originally gave this post the title, “Stigler: The Changing History of Robustness,” but then I was afraid nobody would read it. In the current environment of Move Fast and Break Things, not so many people care about robustness. Also, the widespread use of robustness checks to paper over brittle conclusions has given robustness a […]

tl;dr: Their 95% interval for the infection rate, given the data available, is [0.7%, 1.8%]. My Bayesian interval is [0.3%, 2.4%]. Most of what makes my interval wider is the possibility that the specificity and sensitivity of the tests can vary across labs. To get a narrower interval, you’d need additional assumptions regarding the specificity […]

Kevin Lewis pointed me to this article. It seemed kinda familiar, I took a look at the abstract, and I realized . . . I reviewed this article for the journal! Here was my referee report: The paper seems fine to me. I have only two minor comments, both relating to the abstract. 1. I […]

We’ve had lots of discussions here and elsewhere online about fundamental flaws in statistics culture: the whole p-value thing, statistics used for confirmation rather than falsification, corruption of the pizzagate variety, soft corruption in which statistics is used in the service of country-club-style backslapping, junk science routinely getting the imprimatur of the National Academy of […]

Anthony Fowler wrote a wonderful op-ed. You have to read the whole thing, but let me start with his most important point, about “the temptation to overclaim” in social science: One study estimated the economic value of the people spared through social-distancing efforts. Essentially, the authors took estimates from epidemiologists about the number of lives […]

The other day we posted some Stan models of coronavirus infection rate from the Stanford study in Santa Clara county. The Bayesian setup worked well because it allowed us to directly incorporate uncertainty in the specificity, sensitivity, and underlying infection rate. Mitzi Morris put all this in a Google Collab notebook so you can run […]

What’s new? The new and shiny reduce_sum facility released with Stan 2.23 is far more user-friendly and makes it easier to scale Stan programs with more CPU cores than it was before. While Stan is awesome for writing models, as the size of the data or complexity of the model increases it can become impractical […]

The University of Washington in Seattle is a big place. It includes the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which has produced a widely-circulated and widely-criticized coronavirus model. As we’ve discussed, the IHME model is essentially a curve-fitting exercise that makes projections using the second derivative of the time trend on the log scale. […]

David Rohde points us to this new seminar series that has the following description: Machine learning is changing the world we live in at a break neck pace. From image recognition and generation, to the deployment of recommender systems, it seems to be breaking new ground constantly and influencing almost every aspect of our lives. […]

After getting 80 zillion comments on that last post with all that political content, I wanted to share something that’s purely technical. It’s something Bob Carpenter wrote in a conversation regarding implementing algorithms in Stan: One thing we are doing is having the matrix library return more expression templates rather than copying on return as […]

Proposal to temporarily loosen restrictions on on-site sales faces uncertain prospect in session's final days.

A sheriff's deputy in North Carolina is facing criminal charges after authorities say he led a group of armed people to wrong home in a search for a missing girl.

Two legislative stalwarts lose endorsements as a wave of younger, more liberal challengers emerges in Minneapolis.

Bruising convention battle calls into question party unity behind the Peterson challenger.

Returning Internal Revenue Service workers in Kansas City are being directed to a room well-stocked with face masks, while some other IRS offices were still telling staffers to buy or make their own as the Trump administration starts rolling out a location-based plan for returning more of the some 2 million federal workers to job sites.